Dean Dad has an interesting and useful post on how to figure out departmental norms while you’re interviewing.
Basically, figure out what it is you really want, and ask specific questions about those particular things.
As Captain Awkward would say, Use Your Words.
It’s no secret that I disagree with the general academic credo that geography matters less than getting a job in your field. For many of us, location is at least important to our long-term happiness as the job itself.
I know a fair few people who landed an academic job in a location they didn’t prefer, and, in the end, the lack of resonance with the place undermined any goodness they were finding in the job. Then they were faced with either going on the job market again, with a more limited geographic range, or leaving academia. It just postponed the dilemma.
As in all things, people vary. I also have friends who landed academic jobs in Idaho, Montana, New Hampshire, Texas, Illinois, Missouri, Georgia, Alaska, and Arizona who have grown to love landscapes and cultures they were not previously part of. It’s not that you can’t possibly make a good life somewhere you might not have otherwise chosen to live.
But if you turn out to be unable or unwilling to put down roots somewhere, that doesn’t mean that you’re a failure, or that you’re insufficiently committed, or that you really just do need to suck it up.
For all kinds of complicated reasons, we resonate with some places and not with others. It’s not that any place is bad; it’s that some places are Our Places and some places are Not Our Places. Even if a place has everything you think you want, it can still be Not Your Place.
The metaphor I always use is dating. You’ve probably had the experience of meeting someone who, on paper, seemed like a perfect fit for you — and you had no desire to ever see them again. Maybe there was nothing wrong, per se, but there was no spark, no connection.
I’m a Navy brat. We moved less than some — only about every three years — but every move was over a significant body of water. While we (nearly) always lived on coasts (did you know the main supply base for the Navy is in the middle of Pennsylvania? Neither did I), Scotland is not Puerto Rico is not Virginia is not Hawaii. After I left home for college, I started in Illinois, went to Pennsylvania, then West Virginia, and then DC.
In other words, I know from moving geographies and local cultures. One of the skills I got from that upbringing was the ability to root myself and make a home anywhere.
I can move and make a really good life anywhere. And there are still places that are My Places and places that are Not My Places.
DC is a liberal, vibrant city with lots of culture and a good public transportation system. It is Not My Place. I have friends for whom it is definitely Their Place. It’s not whether DC is good or bad — it’s whether I have a connection to the place, whether we resonate together.
A recent study looked at residents of Boston and San Francisco, cities that on paper have a lot of similarities but which are very different. It found that residents of those cities had different definitions of success and happiness. If you’re a person who experiences success the way Bostonians do, you won’t be super comfortable in San Francisco and vice versa.
Place matters, and not only because of the landscape. Place matters because every place grows and attracts a certain kind of person, for whatever reason. If those people feel like Your People, the place will work for you. If they don’t, the place probably won’t. If the place feels actively antithetical to Your People, run. You will be miserable.
It’s not as simple as coasts v. “flyover states” (how I hate that term). It’s not city v. country, or blue state v. red. It’s this particular culture in this particular landscape with these particular people.
You can certainly surprise yourself by discovering a Your Place that you didn’t expect, or not resonating with a place you were convinced would work. I have a friend who dreamed of moving to Taos, who moved to Taos and hated it. Life can be surprising.
If you choose geography based on a job, that’s legitimate.
If you choose geography based on the needs of your family, that’s legitimate.
If you choose geography based on the kind of life you want to live, that’s legitimate.
If you choose geography based on weather and climate, that’s legitimate.
If you choose geography based on people you like, that’s legitimate.
If you choose geography based on a whim, that’s legitimate.
Geography matters. Of course it matters. And you’re the only one who can decide how it figures in to your decision-making, and whether a given place is a reasonable choice.
You’ve probably all seen the news that a Colorado university posted a job ad that explicitly asked for PhDs conferred in 2010 or later. Not surprisingly, the interwebs exploded with arguments about the legality of such a requirement (is this age discrimination?) and the general unfairness of it all.
I am not a lawyer, and I don’t play one on tv. I have nothing to offer to the legality argument. What I want to talk about is the way this job ad makes explicit a preference that has long been implicit in ads for assistant professorships.
For over a decade now, I’ve heard PhDs who were more than two years out complain that they were being passed over for jobs in favor of those with more-recently conferred degrees. Some people got jobs their second year on the market, but even that wasn’t as robust as anyone wanted.
I’m sure there have been exceptions, but the desire for recency has been built in to assistant professor hires for a long time now.
Why? Because departments want to hire people who are intimately in touch with the most current research, so those hires can both be productive researchers and contribute that research knowledge to the department. They (often rightly) assume that if you’re teaching 4 courses as an adjunct, you’re not spending a lot of time on your research or staying current in your field. Even if you are, it’s a very different current than it was when you were ears deep in writing.
This is not an unreasonable desire on the part of a hiring department. The problem is that the overproduction of PhDs / underproduction of faculty jobs mean they can be as choosy as they want to be, because there are so many excellent, qualified candidates for every job.
Colorado State is merely making explicit what has been implicit all this time. (As I said above, I’m passing on the argument about whether this is legal.)
There are two ways I see this going. One is that the ad / search is deemed illegal, and every search has to show that they’re looking seriously at people with a wide range of ages and degree years.
Another is that more and more ads make the desire for recency explicit, because it helps winnow down what has become a truly epic pile of applications to something more manageable.
We can all see how the first case could be helpful. But I’d argue that the second case could also be helpful.
Because all of this has been implicit, it’s been easy for PhDs to convince themselves that if they just keep adjuncting and go on the market one more time, it could work out. It could be them this year, grasping that brass ring. This enables people to hold on to hope, spend half a decade performing underpaid work, and put off the pain of really leaving.
If this becomes standard, it could help all of us know when enough is enough and it’s time to try something else.
In my ideal world, every fabulous PhD would get an equally fabulous job. We’re all smart, capable, insightful scholars, and I’d love to see all of that brilliance put to the service of expanding the realms of knowledge and helping the next generation learn.
That isn’t going to happen anytime soon.
In the absence of enough jobs, I want every PhD to honestly know where he or she stands. I want people to know the odds and the game, and to be able to make the best decisions they can within that game. I want people to know when to call it.
Yes, it’s really sad and unfair when bright people don’t get the job they’ve spent the better part of a decade preparing for. But you know what’s even more sad and unfair? Those same people trying over and over again even when the chances for success have dropped to close to zero.
You don’t deserve that kind of hell.
We humans tend to avoid pain, and we tend to assume that the thing we aren’t doing is going to be so. much. more painful than where we are right now. That can be true, but it’s often just our fear talking. We tend to stay with the comfort of the familiar even when the alternative could be better.
That’s not to say leaving is easy. It’s not. Oh, it’s really not. There’s a lot of grief and disappointment and fear to work through. You’ve got to grapple with a whole new world of who you’ll be professionally. This all takes work, and it’s painful.
Is it more painful than years of constant rejection and being told institutionally that you aren’t worth a living wage or basic health insurance? I don’t think it is. We’re just used to the latter. It’s familiar.
So I’m glad that this conversation has become explicit. I’m glad that an assumption has been brought out into the light. I’m glad for anything that could spare one of you years of dashed hopes. You deserve so much better.